The present invention relates to surface mount electronic components such as chip capacitors, resistors and inductors. More specifically, the invention concerns arrays of such elements mountable on printed circuit boards with a single placement step and a method for making the arrays.
It is known in the art to configure a plurality of multi-layer ceramic chip capacitors in a monolithic body to allow multiple capacitors to be surface mounted on a printed circuit board in a single placement step. According to known technique, a capacitor array is formed as a monolithic body utilizing a process wherein raw ceramic material of each capacitor is fused together in a high temperature sintering process. Using this technique, it is only possible to test the performance of the individual capacitors once the sintering process is complete and the monolithic body is formed. As a result, if just one of the capacitor elements is found defective, correction requires replacement of the entire capacitor array. This results in significant manufacturing waste and inefficiency.
An additional problem with conventional manufacturing techniques is that it does not readily allow formation of a unitized capacitor array having individual capacitor elements of differing sizes and dielectric materials.